Rook:see you in an hour.
Varga:forty-three minutes.
That would peg his arrival at 8:47. Coach Markel tried to move him to 8:30 three years back, but he failed. Varga insisted on making a solo entrance. Being late was the easiest way to do that.
I put the phone down, and the locker room door opened. It was Heath. He wore a gray hoodie and found me across the room, nodding slightly, and I nodded back. Three seasons of that nod. He walked to his own stall on the opposite wall and started taking his skates out of his bag.
Varga rounded the corner at 8:41, six minutes early. He was already mid-conversation, or I should say monologue, with Kieran.
”—and I’m telling him, sir, I don’t care what kind of avocado you grew up with; this is the avocado that exists in the Jewel-Osco on Clybourn. It’s the avocado available to us, and you and I are going to make guacamole with this avocado, or we are going to go without—“
Kieran peeled off without comment. Mikkelsen looked up and listened. Varga had his bag on one shoulder, his jacket on the other, and he placed a hand on Mikkelsen’s shoulder, as if he were steadying a boat at the dock.
I didn’t look up. I had a stick between my knees and tape between my fingers. Looking up at Varga’s entrance every morning was the kind of small thing the room would have noticed. He knew I’d heard him from the door. That was enough for both of us.
”—the kid can’t be twenty-three, he’s wearing avest, he’s having a moment about Hass versus Fuerte—“
“What’s a Fuerte?” Mikkelsen asked. It was the first words I’d heard out of his mouth all morning.
Varga squeezed his shoulder. “What’s a—Rafe, look at me. We’re going to fix this together.”
I couldn’t help looking up, and I immediately saw that Varga had shaved.
He had come to bed last night with his usual beard—the one he said made him look like a real hockey player. At some point this morning, after I was gone, he had taken it off cleanly, and the face he was wearing into the room was one I had not seen on him for at least three years.
I looked back down at my stick.
“Varga,” Trier said from the end of the long wall. “What happened to your face?”
The question was an invitation. He put his hand on his jaw and held it there, stricken. “What?”
“Your face.”
“My face is a face, Trier.”
“The beard.”
“Ahem…the beard isgone,Trier, I have liberated it, I have moved on and entered a new—“
“Why?”
Varga stopped. He stood there with his bag still on his shoulder and considered the question. “New season,” he said to the room. “New me. If I’m going to play pretty, I might as well look pretty too.”
The room groaned. A roll of stick tape arced through the air and hit him in the thigh. Pratt, in his stall, did not look up.
“Pretty,” Trier said. “He says pretty.Pretty what?”
“Pretty everything.Beautiful, if you prefer that.”
“Cross is going to put you on waivers.”
“Cross adores me. Cross is going to write a song about my —“
“Varga,” Pratt said from the stall. He said it once, at the flat volume he said everything.
Varga stopped. He looked at the goalie. “I’m pretty.”
“Sure,” Pratt said.
